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  • DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019 Programming Highlights: What I’m Looking Forward To

    DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019 Programming Highlights: What I’m Looking Forward To

    I am so excited about the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Las Vegas. As a programming committee, we seek to make each event better than the last, as measured by how much we learn and how it helps enable the DevOps Enterprise community to achieve their goals.

    As a programming committee, we thought London 2019 was our best conference yet (almost unanimously), which poses a challenge of how could we possibly do better—but I’ve found over the last several years that this is doable, mostly by being very explicit about what challenges across our community we want to help to overcome.

    This year, we focused on the following areas, and I think you’ll find the upcoming conference does an amazing job of addressing them:

    • Experience reports of technology leaders presenting with even more senior business leaders.
    • Overcoming obstacles in security and compliance.
    • Experience reports and subject matter experts in the areas of data science and data initiatives.

    Reviewing this post, I’m finding the number of amazing stories being presented is so good that it’s incredibly difficult to pick which ones to mention here. But, the following speakers really stood out to me, because they’re so different than those from previous years:

    • David Almeda, chief people officer at Kronos: I was blown away when I saw him present. He talked about how one of their top strategic goals was to attract and retain great talent—the result was Kronos being named as one of the top 100 best places to work by both Fortune Magazine and Glassdoor, enabling then to support continued growth, innovation and profitability. He’ll be teaching us the value of employee engagement, and how the top levels of leadership view it.
    • Andre Martin, VP and chief learning officer at Google: Until recently, Dr. Martin was chief learning officer at Target, and before that, at NIKE. He will be sharing what his charter was in those roles, why those organizations created his role in the first place and how it could advance the mission of the DevOps Enterprise community.
    • The Big Four Auditor panel: In this amazing panel, we have four distinguished experts who support the audit practice.  We will be busting the most commonly heard myths and objections about “why DevOps can’t work here,” such as why DevOps can’t be done in regulated industry, why separation of duties prevents DevOps and many more. The four auditors are: Yosef Levine from Deloitte, Michael Wolf from KPMG, Matt Bonser from PwC and Pierre Fourie from Ernst & Young. They will be hosting two Ask An Auditor Anything workshops, facilitated by Dr. Tapabrata Pal and Sam Guckenheimer. This is an opportunity to anonymously ask questions about the audit process with some of the best experts in the space.

    I attended a smaller version of this session in London and I thought it was incredible and truly notable.  This one promises to be a landmark moment for the DevOps Enterprise community.

    Without a doubt, the programming committee has worked hard to create a high learning experience filled with technology leaders pioneering the business practices that will surely be commonplace within a decade. This, combined with experts from the domains that we’re drawing upon to help achieve our goals–along with exciting networking opportunities each day of the event–has helped us establish an industry forum for exchanging insights and information we need as a community.

    I hope you’ll join us in Las Vegas, and that you’re as delighted by the program as we are! In my career, I have grown to love conferences and have benefited so much from them. And yet, this conference is still my favorite. I never learn as much in such a short period than when I’m at DOES.

    Acknowledgements and Changes from Last Year

    I want to thank everyone for submitting a proposal to DOES for Vegas 2019. I personally appreciate and recognize the effort required to prepare your submissions. And I know because I still spend a lot of time preparing and submitting proposed abstracts.

    This year was the most difficult selection process for the programming committee ever, especially when so many are friends and people whose work we all respect so highly.

    To explain how we made decisions, I want to frame everything in terms of the conference programming objectives. Broadly speaking, here are the number of talk slots we reserved for each programming objectives:

    Talk Track Subject Areas Slots
    Experience Reports: New 12
    Experience Reports: Repeat 6
    Spanning Business/Tech Divide 9
    Next Gen Ops 8
    Overcoming old ways of working 7
    Subject Matter Experts 7
    Dynamic Learning Organizations 5
    Leadership Lessons, Transformational Leadership 3
    Other 4
    Total 65

    One thing that you should notice right away is every track only has a few slots. Another thing you are probably unaware of is we had more speaking submissions than ever before–it blows my mind just thinking about it.

    Evolving Programming Objectives

    In addition to the amazing response we received for this year’s call for presentations, we also worked to address some feedback from 2018 that “some talks sounded the same as last year.” So, we reviewed the talks again, and observed that some of the repeat speakers we invited didn’t have a lot of change since the last time they spoke. As a result, we’ve done two things:

    1. We’ve nearly halved the number of speaker slots for repeat speakers (see stats below)
      • 45% of repeat speakers (Vegas 2018)
      • 27% of repeat speakers (Vegas 2019)
    2. We invited repeat speakers who have a large change to report, or a different perspective to share (e.g., a different co-presenter from another business area), etc.

    In general, our top-level goal every year is to help technology leaders succeed in transforming their organizations—both by increasing the likelihood of their success and accelerating the rate of adoption of DevOps principles and practices by focusing on the following talk tracks and subject areas listed above.

    We aim to fulfill this goal through speaker presentations, both from technology leaders and/or subject matter experts from those domains. We also do this through less structured networking sessions where attendees can find other people who are tackling similar challenges or want to learn more about a particular area of interest.

    New Experience Reports

    One of the hallmarks of DOES is our program focuses on spotlighting real world experience reports, straight from the mouths of those who are driving enterprise-scale transformation. As adult learners, and as leaders, there are few (if any) better ways to learn than watching how other people in similar situations solve their problems.

    Besides enabling learning, experience reports serve another important goal—they help us as leaders negate objections that “DevOps can’t be done here.” I’m happy to say over the past six years, we’ve assembled a growing library of 250 experience reports from some of the most recognized brands around the world. As a whole, it shows DevOps principles and patterns are universal across nearly every industry vertical today. Some of the new experience reports I cannot wait to hear in October include:

    • Heather Mickman (VP platform engineering) and David Cherryhomes (VP, IT), UnitedHealth Group: Heather and David will be talking about their amazing work transforming business and technology at UHG, the largest healthcare company in the world, with over 115 million customers. (You will likely remember Heather from her pioneering work at Target, co-presenting with Ross Clanton from 2014-2015 and keynoting by herself in 2016).
    • Fernando Cornago (senior director, platform engineering) and Benjamin Grimm (senior director experience .com), Adidas: They will be presenting about the work they have done to elevate developer productivity at Adidas, including supporting the incredibly important e-commerce initiatives, as well as product design. They will share how they’ve educated top executives and even board members on critical technology concepts, and how they’re making all data easy consumable by everyone across the company.
    • Kira Barclay (director, analytics) and Elizabeth Conzo (analytics leader), John Deere: They will be presenting the amazing work they’ve been doing supporting both enterprise data initiatives, as well as incubating Horizon 3 initiatives and modernizing the software practices in some of the largest product lines at John Deere.
    • Ralf Waltram (VP of IT delivery), BMW: Ralf will be talking about the DevOps and Project to Product journey, which as he says, is how BMW is transitioning from project management to product management. In the BMW team’s words, this the “largest change to how business is done at BMW in twenty years.”
    • Jim Lloyd (chief of the innovation branch, field operations directorate) and Melinda Solomon (Agile training lead), USCIS: Jim and Melinda will be sharing the continuation of the DevOps journey at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Jim will be talking about specific mission objectives at USCIS, and the business and technology partnership.
    • Jaclyn Damiano (associate director) and Josh Stone (senior architect/evangelist), Verizon: Verizon has holistically undergone massive organizational and business changes in the past year. A voluntary separation package and outsourcing to third parties has changed the makeup of the team and the culture. A corporate reorganization so significant it is defined as “Verizon 2.0.” They will be talking about how to stay the course on digital transformation, cloud migration and culture change in such a turbulent environment.

    Continued Experience Reports

    This year, we will have six companies back to present their continuing experience reports at the conference. Having this pattern of repeat speakers may be a bit unusual, but I personally love that we’re following these courageous leaders along their journey. I want the experience to have front-row seats to an unfolding documentary of the ongoing transformations they are leading in their large, complex organizations.

    How has the story from the previous year evolved for the organization and the leader? What new obstacles emerged, and how did they overcome them? Is this a path the rest of us want to follow? What are the things worth celebrating as part of this journey and why? For DOES Las Vegas, we have the privilege of welcoming these people back to take the stage:

    • Scott Prugh, chief architect and VP software development at CSG: Scott has spoken at every DOES since the beginning. This year, I’ve asked Scott to speak on something he’s never directly spoken about, which is how they’ve overcome incredible architectural challenges as their transaction growth exploded.  This is one of the most incredible engineering achievements I’ve ever seen.

    Spanning the Business and Technology Divide

    One of the top challenges we see year after year is how to get business leadership on board—and by that, I mean enthusiastic and grateful business partners, who want to tell the world how all their goals and aspirations are finally achieved by working together with their technology counterparts.

    These are often the most difficult talks to find, because they require a technology leader with a great working relationship with their business counterpart, and visible success. In Las Vegas 2018, we had some fantastic talks along these lines (from Nike, Capital One, Target, The Walt Disney Company and Kaiser Permanente).

    This year, we’ll be featuring even more talks like this (33% more to be exact), showing how technology leaders are partnering with not just business leaders, but also other areas of the business, such as product leadership, security/privacy, legal, project management and so forth. Specifically, we are eager to hear from the CFO and Project Portfolio perspective. Here are a few talks I’m super excited to hear:

    • Chris O’Malley (CEO) and Joe Aho (CFO), Compuware: My fireside chat with Chris O’Malley last year was one of the most talked about sessions last year. I’ve invited him back with his CFO, asking them to teach us how to better interact with CFOs, a famously conservative group, and how we can win them over to help DevOps initiatives.
    • Levi Geinert (SVP and head of Agile technology experience) and Werner Loots (EVP consumer and business banking), U.S. Bank: Levi talk about his new role in the Experience Studios, where their goal is to reimagine banking, an effort being driven from the very highest levels of leadership. He and Werner will speak about some of their challenges and noteworthy successes, which has created excitement across the organization.

    Next Generation Operations

    After hearing ops needed more representation at DOES, in 2018 we reserved nearly a quarter of our talks to focus on ops and infrastructure challenges, and created a separate subcommittee to focus on this area. While we aren’t going to have as many next generation ops talks this year, it is our third largest talk track behind new experience reports and spanning the tech and business divide.

    What’s amazing is that we learned the elevation of this topic has fundamentally changed the feel of the conference itself. The programming committee has made an effort to help define and clarify what exactly the role of an ops leader is, and how all the technology and organizational changes there have been in how infrastructure is designed, delivered and operated. I’m thrilled to be able to see this presentation this year:

    • Scott Havens, director of software engineering at Walmart Labs and Jet.com: Until very recently, Scott was responsible for rebuilding the entire inventory management systems that support Walmart, the world’s largest company. He will be sharing how he used functional programming principles to massively simplify the vast architecture that supported the inventory management systems, making it simpler, more reliable, easier to maintain and cheaper to run.

    Subject Matter Expert Talks

    All leaders are, for the most part, self-teaching ourselves what we think we need to learn to be successful. Technology leaders in particular have to adapt to a somewhat constant rates of disruption and change happening around us. In the past, we’ve brought experts such as Dr. Christina Maslach (burnout) and Dr. Richard Cook (safety culture) to deliver talks about the domains we want to learn more about to help us reach our desired outcomes. This year we have the following subject matter experts onsite to deliver presentations:

    • Andre Martin, VP and chief learning officer at Google: Until recently, Dr. Martin was chief learning officer at Target, and before that, at NIKE. He will be sharing what his charter was in those roles, and why those organizations created his role in the first place, and how it could advance the mission of the DevOps Enterprise community.
    • Christopher Bergh, CEO and head chef at DataKitchen: He will be talking about the chronic problems of getting data from where it resides (typically trapped within data warehouses) to where it needs to go (by the teams who need data to make decisions, or manipulate it to make it more useful). Chris had a huge impact on the development of The Unicorn Project, and helped me see the parallel universe of DataOps.
    • Nicole Forsgren, head of DORA and Dr. Dustin Smith, human factors psychologist and senior user experience researcher at Google: They will be presenting all the amazing and continuing findings from the 2019 State of DevOps Report, which continues to uncover fascinating insights on what enables high performance.

    Networking Opportunities, Lean Coffee, Lightning Talks and More

    In addition to all the wonderful talk tracks and exciting presentations above, the conference program creates a forum for different ways to “get together and go faster.”

    I’ve said this before, but it is so important for the organizers of DOES to help attendees achieve their desired outcomes. One of the most special experiences at DOES comes from meaningful one-on-one interactions with your fellow attendees.

    To that end, and together with my friend and IT Revolution advisor, Jeff Gallimore, we have established different ways for people to learn, ask and answer as many questions as possible–based on experiments and what we learned from London earlier this year. Because the quality of the audience is one aspect that we think separates the DOES from all the rest, the more spontaneous conversations and interactions we can nurture onsite, the better for all.

    • DevOps Confessions: At the beginning of each day, programming committee members will read anonymized stories of confessions from leaders in the DevOps community to learn about the struggles, failures and near-misses. These are some of the best anecdotes you may ever hear.
    • Speakers Corner: We created a dedicated time and a location to ask the plenary speakers questions that go deeper on the information presented earlier that day.
    • Lean Coffee: Led by Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible and the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today, attendees can connect with and learn from their peers in a semi-structured format all three days of the conference.
    • Birds of a Feather Sessions: This is more like the DevOpsDays unconference sessions, with less structure than a Lean Coffee format, and these sessions are driven by specific topics that attendees want to discuss and learn about. I thoroughly enjoyed the interactions of these sessions in Las Vegas last year.
    • Lightning Talks: These are rapid-fire, must-see presentations that happen from the main stage after the conference day has concluded. Also, as a bonus, the IT Revolution book signing happens immediately afterward.
    • Industry Party: In addition to sponsor giveaways, great food and drinks, this is when I’ll have the book signing of my newest title, The Unicorn Project. The industry party is one of my favorite times during the conference to continue conversations with my fellow attendees and speakers.
    • Slack Workspace: The conference will have a shared Slack workspace for people to interact with speakers, attendees and sponsors. In the past, this is where people have connected to make plans, search/recruit for job opportunities and more.

    As you can see, there’s a lot getting me excited for the conference this year, and I hope to see you there!

    To preview DOES Las Vegas 2019 and learn more about the conference, please watch previous videos of our presentations, download the past speakers’ slide decks and view photos from all past events.

    Special offer: Pre-order 10 copies (or more) of The Unicorn Project by Oct. 30 and receive $350+ off your next conference registration, plus lots of other bonuses. For more details click here.

    — Gene Kim

  • DOES UK: Nike Applies ‘Just Do It’ Attitude to DevOps

    DOES UK: Nike Applies ‘Just Do It’ Attitude to DevOps

    Nike’s DevOps transformation has had a lasting impact on its culture and productivity, while allowing the company to connect with its customer in ways it never could before. Its journey down the path to DevOps was shared at the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES UK) 2018,  in London.

    For a company of its size and success in the current market to take a giant leap of faith and come out even more successful takes incredible courage, hard work and collaboration. But that’s Nike for you: Shoes, apparel or DevOps—it doesn’t make a difference to the company. From day 1, Nike has lived its mantra, “Just Do It!”

    Imagine this: You’re a high-level IT employee at a non-technology-focused company with a market value of just over $110 billion. All of a sudden, the newly appointed CEO makes the most significant announcement in recent history of the company, essentially saying, “We are entering a new era of growth and we expect to use technology as our main way of getting closer to the customer.” Pretty crazy, huh?

    This was reality for Randy Lyons, a longtime employee at Nike with an extremely strong taste for competition and the opportunity of a lifetime in his hands. Based in the EMEA region, Lyons teamed with global Nike CFO Michelle Power with one goal in mind: to bring customers closer to the products, available at any of their 7,000 branded stores globally, through a digital platform. The aim was to tap into consumers’ need to check our phones before making a purchase. The scale was momentous; arguably, larger than any other company achieving a successful DevOps or Agile transformation before. To pull this off on the scale CEO Mark Parker had intended, a complete culture shift was necessary.

    Luckily, the unlikely team shared the motto, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and they were eager for the challenge. To start, they needed to change the self-identity of the IT branch. For too long had the underutilized IT staff heard the narrative that “technology helps the business succeed,” rather than existing as a part of the business. Lyons and Power placed a heavy emphasis on the new role of cross-functional IT teams as an integral part of the company rather than a useful helper. They adopted the hashtag “#OneTeam,” which promoted interaction and alignment of the tech team with all other teams, and showed everyone working for them that they were fully invested and energized in positively changing the culture and structural hierarchy of Nike. Additionally, they sought to point out the impact each person’s work was playing through the lens of the overall strategy. The “How is what I’m working on going to effect the direction of this company?” question versus “What else do you need me to do?” was a significant change—it boosted the overall motivation of the teams to work together and even raised individual production significantly.

    However, the transformation was only beginning. Early on Power and Lyons discovered a fundamental flaw in the company they sought to transform: Their employees didn’t feel rewarded for their work. While it might be easy for some companies to blow off this issue in favor of dealing with “bigger” issues, they wanted to promote a company culture that would foster growth and speed, which would not—or could not—happen unless their teams felt beyond satisfied with their workplace environment. So, instead of the annual award ceremony Nike regularly used to reward and congratulate its employees, Lyons and Power decided to implement a simple change they felt would satisfy everyone: They added 15 minutes to the end of their weekly Friday staff meeting to give shout-outs everyone who had performed above expectations on a project. It was awkward at first, Lyons admitted. He also described it as “quite American” (ha ha)! However, this simple idea created a complete culture shift. Suddenly, the tech team was being praised by the supply team, while the supply team was being praised by the sales team, and the sales team was being praised by the tech team. This weekly validation of a job well done turned into more jobs well done!

    Ultimately, the agile teams were motivated enough and aligned in such an efficient way that they were able to produce five separate software systems fully integrated into a single one-member profile:

    1. com (full selection of products sold in store)
    2. Nike app (for a more personalized experience)
    3. Sneakers (collection of shoes sold in store)
    4. NRC (for running products)
    5. NTC (for training products)

    These software products were incredibly effective in creating an emotional attachment with the brand and the products. Finally, the goal of getting the customer closer to the product through a digital interface had been achieved. The process to get there wasn’t easy. There were many problems to overcome and many things that changed drastically to allow for a newer and more efficient way of doing things. However, Lyons noted this transformation was the most influential on a personal level for him: Before undertaking this project, he didn’t feel as though he could effectively serve as both a team leader and participant. He could easily take orders and sometimes give them out, but it wasn’t until he partnered with Power that he learned to become a not just a team player, but the best player on his team.

    The DevOps journey was a transformational process for both the company and the people involved. Today, “Just Do It” means exponentially more to Nike than just a slogan—it’s a way of adding value and efficiency to business.

    This was just one of many of great presentations at this years DevOps Enterprise Summit UK this past week. We will be highlighting others in the days ahead.

    — Landon Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Post-DOES Workshop w/ Gary Gruver & Helen Beal

    DevOps Chat: Post-DOES Workshop w/ Gary Gruver & Helen Beal

    Post-DOES WorkshopGene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit UK is just a few weeks away, June 25-26. While DOES UK this year is shaping up to be a must-see event, there are also some great events taking place around DOES. One is sponsored by Electric Cloud (also a founding sponsor of DOES). It is a post-DOES workshop, featuring classes taught by Gary Gruver, John Willis and Helen Beal.

    The workshop session lineup includes “DevSecOps,” by John Willis, “Leading the DeOps Transformation,” by Gary Gruver and “DevOps Essentials,” with Helen Beal. Helen’s DevOps essentials and Gary’s executive leader workshops are both half-days, so you can attend both. Each of these are great learning events as well as a great way to network with your peers. If you are in London on June 27, be sure to check them out.

    As usual, immediately below is the streaming audio of our conversation, followed by a transcript so you can follow along.

    Audio

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, it’s Alan Shimel and you’re listening to a special edition of DevOps Chat. We have three folks on our panel for DevOps Chat today, and each one of them, actually, are really kind of special people to me within the DevOps community. And let me introduce them to you right off. First and foremost, ladies first.

    I want to introduce Helen Beal. Helen of course is DevOps fantastic at Ranger Four. But also, Helen was one of the first people I met in the DevOps community over in London and has been a friend ever since. Also has a position with the DevOps institute – an advisory role at DevOps institute as well. So Helen, welcome to DevOps cChat.

    Helen Beal: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here as always talking to you.

    Shimel: Thank you. My second guest really needs to introduction in the DevOps community. He has three – count them, one, two, three books around DevOps as well as many years of leading DevOps teams at HP and Macy’s and now consulting for many, many different organizations and helping them with their digital transformations and DevOps journeys, none other than Gary Gruver. Gary, welcome.

    Gary Gruver: Hi, thanks great to be here, nice to be speaking with you again.

    Shimel: Nice to have you here. And then certainly, last but not least – one of my good friends in the DevOps world, he runs marketing at Electric Cloud, which is also of course the founding partner of the DevOps enterprise summit (DOES) with Gene Kim and ITREV– Sam Fell. Sam, welcome.

    Sam Fell: Thank you, Alan. Happy to be here.

    Shimel: Okay, first thing I want to talk about today is we’re getting close to DOES London, which I believe is what? June 25 and 25 over at the O2 in London.

    And I know you’ll all be attending there and of course we can – Electric Cloud is again one of the founding sponsors and we can get all that information over on the IT revolution site. But part and parcel with Does London this year, I wanted to mention two special events taking place on the heels of Does London.

    One is a special post-Does workshop which, Sam, you and the Electric Cloud folks have driven. Why don’t you give us a little background here on what you guys are doing and why?

    Fell: Yeah, great – thanks, Alan, I appreciate that. So Gary – you mentioned, he has had all this experience helping these large  companies with their digital transformations. When we started our user conference back in 2013, Gene Kim came and spoke, Jez Humble came and spoke.

    And we were talking together, we said these are exactly the kind of people – these old horses that are trying to do these transformations that we want to try and attract to a large conference, which is sort of what the genesis of the DevOps enterprise summit. The folks that show up at that show, a lot of them are in a tough spot.

    They know they need to transform. Their business wants them to transform, they don’t know how to go about doing it. And so having a community of people that are available to talk to and learn from, admit mistakes to in a safe way, to know that you’re gonna get advice and counsel, it’s a fantastic show that the team has put together. And you can see by the success of it that the community really embraces it.

    So our thought last year with Gary was why don’t we take somebody who has helped companies with these transformations and go to DevOps enterprise summit and listen to those stories and see what people are going through and then directly after that you get in a room with an expert coach who can say, now, let’s apply that to you. Let’s apply that to your situation. All those stories that you’ve heard, how does that work for you?

    And last year we had just a fantastic time and so we decided to do the same thing this year at Does London. We’ll be doing the same thing at Does Los Vegas in October as well. And it’s just an opportunity for people to really put in practice and make real a lot of the things that they heard at the fantastic DevOps Enterprise Summit.

    Shimel: Fantastic, Sam. And it is, it’s a great workshop. Gary and Helen – before I jump over to you, Sam – I forget I apologize. For people to register for the workshop, what’s the cause? What’s involved? Where do they go?

    Fell: So it’s a heavily subsidized workshop. Helen, the DevOps institute, Gary, John Willis – these guys are giving their time in order to provide this for the community. Electric Cloud is helping to pay for the room and all this other stuff. So the cost is pretty minimal. I think it’s £195.00 for our early bird.

    We don’t have that many tickets eft but there are some tickets. There’s a group rate as well. So you know, non-expensive and it’s an opportunity for you to really rub elbows with people who are always wanting to learn how to do these types of things. And as you mentioned, John, we do have these couple different workshops.

    John Willis is doing Dev-Sec-Ops hands on technical workshop that same day. So we’ve got two tracks that we’ve got set up basically. I don’t want to spill the beans on what Helen and Gary are going to be talking about, but the John Willis workshop  we’re really excited about that. He’s gonna be showing people with a live pipeline how to incrementally improve it. how to bake security into your deployment pipelines.

    And one of the types of things that you can do to enable your teams and your developers to ship secure codes. Fantastic stuff.

    Shimel: Yeah, no, that’s gonna be a great hands on workshop for anyone interested in DevSecOps. We’ll have more info about DevSecOps in a little bit. But first, let’s turn to Gary. Gary – what is your workshop going to be about here?

    Gruver: I think I’m gonna follow your lead. Let’s go with Helen’s first with lady’s first and get to that and I think that’s the order that we’re going in with the day. Why don’t you lead off with Helen and then I’ll follow up.

    Shimel: Chivalry is not dead. Helen – go ahead.

    Beal: Thanks, Gary. So I’m going to be doing the half day DevOps institute course – the essentials of DevOps which essentially kind of what it says on the tin, the fundamentals or the foundation and relevance of DevOps and things like the three ways and coms and how it fits with Agile and IT send and Lean, PK studies, linking it to this integration.

    And continuous delivery. How they lead from one another. So that’s it. It’s a course really for people that are quite new to DevOps and they should expect to leave the course, really with an understanding of where DevOps has come from, why it’s important and what sort of business benefits people can anticipate from using DevOps practice and principles.

    Understanding some of the vocabulary that those of us that kind of live and breathe DevOps are quite familiar with. So things like the theory of constraints and CD and things like that and hopefully with some kind of action plan of what they can take back to their desk the next day and start making some DevOps differences in their own organization.

    Shimel: And it is the DevOps essentials course it’s really sort of a big time version of the full DevOps foundation, which Helen – you were instrumental in refreshing for this latest– I think it’s released three of DevOps foundation?

    Beal: Yeah, it’s very nearly ready. So it’s been updated with lots of additional case studies, we’ve updated things like the surveys too, the latest versions of the state of DevOps surveys. I know there’s another one coming out. I don’t think we’re expecting it for another few months, and actually part of what we’ve been doing this update is following our own principles. So we’re actually aiming for a much more incremental release cycle as we move forwards rather than in frequent big updates.

    I’m sure we’ll all be on board with that. And then, newer things have been coming through like liability engineering and more stuff around services and containers and those sort of things. Focused on safety culture, learning organizations and some of the things that John and Gene can cover in their beyond the finished product audiobook, also featured in there.

    As is some of the material from Nicole’s and Jane’s book – accelerate. And some references to that. And then we’ve removed some of the stuff that kind of isn’t really around anymore in the DevOps World.

    So things like NoOps – think it’s really gone away now. Rocket DevOps has been very overtaken by DevSecOps. So it’s a good solid refresh and hopefully the foundation will be able to keep refreshing it more frequently as this is such a fast changing world that we’re in – this DevOps world.

    Shimel: It certainly is. Okay, that’s fantastic Helen. And I encourage listeners that may be in the London area that week, if you’re near to DevOps or you really haven’t taken any formal DevOps sort of education or classes, you know, listening – goes to Does is a great way to learn from real life examples. But really this is a great class to give you a nice foundation in DevOps. Gary, how about you?

    Gruver: I’ll be doing my executive workshop that I do with most organizations when I go in and work with the executives to really help people put together their plans and figure out how do they approach it. The people that are gonna be at. Does are gonna be hearing a lot of different ideas, and a lot of perspectives on what they should be doing and I’ll hopefully be trying to help them put that in context.

    My big thing I champion is there are different approaches you need to use when you’ve got large tightly coupled systems than you do when you have small teams that can independently develop and qualify and deploy code. We’ll be going through a lot of those differences. We’ll be going through the role of the executive in terms of leading the transformation.

    A lot of this can be empowered if you have loosely coupled small teams but if you’ve got large groups of people who have to work together to coordinate the deployment pipeline in terms of being able to develop, qualify and release as a system, then you need to have the executives playing a pretty active role in coordinating the work across those teams and prioritizing the improvement. So we’ll be going through that.

    How do executives get the team all on the same page? And then how do you get them to a common definition of what they’re gonna go do and agree to that? So my analogy is a pipeline ____ described an elephant feels like most discussions I start with organizations that are starting to go down their DevOps transformation.

    And what I work to is a process and approach to give them a common view of the elephant and get people all rowing in the same direction. And helping people understand that the types of things they can and should do are different for large, tightly coupled systems versus loosely coupled systems. And then we’ll go through and we’ll help them understand where they should really be starting their transformation.

    Which is different for a lot of different organizations. And I feel that starting point is really important, because this is a lot of energy. It’s gonna take a lot of effort to transform how you do software development.

    And you really want to pick the changes that are gonna have the biggest impact on your business first off so you can create that positive momentum. I think if you just go down the path of doing DevOps without picking those things that will have the biggest impact, you’ll start doing it, you won’t see the benefits, and over time the organization will kind of disengage and you’ll lose momentum on your transformation.

    So a lot of what we focus on is trying to highlight those key lynchpins that you can really start making the big differences and how to go analyze that for different deployment pipelines in your organization.

    So it’s really that. I’ll be there. But there will also be a lot of your peers in the room. So it’ll be a good opportunity to take the things that you learned at Does to reflect on them and talk with myself and your peers about what you’re thinking about doing.

    And learning from it. And I would say that I’ve been doing this for a long time, and what I tell people is that just gives me more opportunities to have made the mistakes that you’re gonna make.

    And so if I can help you avoid the mistakes I already made so you can go make some new ones, learn from that, that’s kind of my goal. My experience is this stuff is such a breakthrough for the business that we’ve gotta have more people doing it. But how can we help people best we can so they realize those same benefits.

    Shimel: Excellent. Gary – you know, one of the things I think sometimes people get confused or question is when we talk about this is aimed at executives. It’s sort of a loaded term. In a large organization like a Macy’s, executive might mean CIO, it might mean VP of IT. in other organizations it may mean a director level. Can you give us a better definition or how you define you know, the executive who is gonna get a lot of good out of this workshop?

    Gruver: I think they all will. I’ve done it all the way from the CIO and I do execution workshops down to – to the leaders that are responsible for a tightly coupled deployment pipeline and then some organizations that might be a director or senior manager that’s over development and ideally, it’s nice that you can bring your partners in QA if it’s separate, and in operations if it’s separate. Maybe your security people, maybe your audit people.

    And come together as a team after Does. So if you’ve got a group of people that have gone to it and gone to a lot of different presentations, having them come together on that will be helpful. So this is the group at whatever level in the organization you think will be leading the transformation, or driving the changes. It can be – typically the CIO when I do the executive workshop is more to inform them of their role in it. Then at some level, we get down to a specific deployment pipeline.

    And the deployment pipeline may still be 1000 people if you’ve got a large tightly coupled system, like we had at Macy’s.

    Which requires large numbers of people working together, or it may be small. And if it’s small, you can do a lot of the things that you’ve seen unicorns do. And if it’s larger, the same principles apply but the practices are a little bit different.

    Shimel: Excellent. Yup. Great. So guys, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Let me do a quick review. Sam, what day is the workshop?

    Fell: The workshop is the day directly after DevOps enterprise summit. Wednesday June 27.

    Shimel: It’s June 27.

    Fell: That’s correct. Right before… DevSecOps days on the 28th!

    Shimel: Yes, and Sam – I will put in our show notes a link to the URL about the workshop and registration. But where is it being held specifically?

    Fell: It’s conveniently located in exactly the same location as the DevOps Enterprise Summit which is the InterContinental – O2 in London. So if you’re in London, very convenient area to get to also. So come on by.

    Shimel: Excellent.

    Gruver: And you don’t have to have gone to DOES or the DevSecOps. If you’re in Europe and you wanted to stop by.

    Shimel: Excellent point. It’s not a pre-req if you’re looking for some good, hands on DevOps training and networking and education, this workshop is a standalone event. It’s fantastic as well. So let’s cover the three different workshops actually being conducted that day though. Number one is we’ve got none other than John Willis himself leading a real hands-on DevSecOps. Is Anders working with John on that one, Sam?

    Fell: Anders will be in there, yeah, he’ll be hanging around. But this is really John’s show. And this is his passion. And he’s driving the technical aspects of this workshop where people are really gonna be able to get their hands dirty with the technology, have a pipeline. Put some vulnerable code through it, and deploy it and then figure out how do we put automated steps in place and how do we sort of put the – get the developers thinking the right way to make sure that that kind of stuff can happen and what are the practices that need to be put in place. So really, for folks who want to try and get that level of specificity of how to do it, not just the high level, interesting, interesting workshop for people.

    Shimel: Absolutely. We’re all hearing a lot about DevSecOps. Gary made reference to DevSecOps. I think Helen did as well. And we talk about this DevSecOps rugged DevOps etc. This is really gonna be hands on. so it’s great whether you’re a DevOps person or a security person. Then we have Helen who is delivering the pre-req 101 DevOps essentials, based on the latest upcoming version of DevOps foundation from the DevOps Institute. And Helen, people who take essentials – do they get any kind of credit or anything towards a foundation or being able to take a certification or anything like that?

    Beal: As you said earlier, it’s basically a cut down version of the DevOps foundation course and that’s a certified course. This isn’t a certified course, so I’m sure if people wanted to follow up with the DevOps foundation, we could sort something out.

    Shimel: Fantastic. And then certainly, last but not least, aimed at DevOps leaders and executives, Gary is gonna be in essence, delivering what many organizations are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for. His course on kind of leading the transformation. That’s taken right from one of your books, Gary. I apologize. But really, dollar for dollar, what a great line up, what a great deal for anyone who is looking for DevOps training and education. I also wanted to quickly before we run out of time here, I wanted to mention that the day after the workshop is the first DevSecOps days in London.

    Again, headlined with John Willis. I think, Helen, you’re speaking there as well. Correct?

    Beal: I am, indeed. Yes.

    Shimel: Give us a little preview, what are you talking about?

    Beal: So John saw a talk I think I did in Belfast or somewhere – maybe last year. It might have been all day DevOps, can’t remember. Anyway. But basically we’ll be talking about DevSecOps engineering as a concept. As you probably know, the DOI at DevOps institute is just about to release a new course for DevSecOps engineering. So we’ll be talking about that role and what the requirements are to be successful in that area.

    Shimel: Yup. And DevSecOps days also promises to be a fantastic day. Sam and the Electric Cloud folks – we’re grateful for your sponsorship. Electric Cloud is one of the sponsors there. I will put in the show notes where you can get more information on DevSecOps days as well. But you can go to DevSecOpsdays.com and that’s the long and short of it right there. Guys, a couple of minutes left, let’s wrap up.

    Helen – beyond all of the great stuff you’re doing with DevOps institute, what any good news? Any new things going on with Ranger Four?

    Beal: One of the nice popular things that we’re doing at the moment is one of my favorite things conveniently as well. Which is our version of Phoenix project simulation game. That we kind of developed with our partner Gaming Works out in Amsterdam. So it’s a one day business simulation so experiential learning rather than classroom learning. We’ve got a free, public version of that coming up in London on the 19th of July. It is quite close to being fully booked.

    But if people want to find me on Linked In or would like to come along, we do have a couple of spaces left.

    Shimel: Excellent. And I’ve done the Phoenix Project simulation game, I love it and I’m sure you guys will deliver a rousing version, highly recommend. Gary, how about you?

    Gruver: Oh, I’m just spending more of my time with individual companies, learning from their journeys and trying to help them avoid the mistakes I’ve made and help them to learn from new mistakes they’re finding so I can help point it out to other people so that people can accelerate their journeys and be more successful. So that’s where I spend most of my time is just coaching different teams that are trying to transform their software development delivery processes.

    Shimel: You know what, Gary – what we should have mentioned though – for maybe folks listening out there who may want to engage your team to help them, where do they get information?

    Gruver: They can just go to garygruther.com – my website. And they can also go there and download a free copy of my latest starting scaling DevOps and enterprise, the electronic copies are there. I self-published that so I can give it away. Authors don’t really make money on books. So it’s out there, so I can give it away.

    If you read the first three chapters and then click at the end, you can get the rest of the chapters if you just give me your name, your title, where you work and where you live so that if I happen to be in the region – I keep thinking I’ll use that as a marketing tool. I haven’t sent anything out to it yet, but I’m still collecting names of the people that read the book because it feels like a good contact for me.

    Shimel: And of course, you’ve updated your privacy regulations to be GDPR. Anyway, Sam let’s see – DOES – you guys are the founding partners of DOES, you’re doing these workshop, you’re helping us with sponsoring DevSecOps days. What are you doing in your spare time?

    Fell: Next week we’re gonna be at Velocity San Jose if anybody is in the area, we’d love to have you stop by and see us. Yeah, we’re just looking forward to seeing everybody out in London. And it’s gonna be a super fun filled week. I mean, it’s a whole week of DevOps. I could not be happier. I’m super excited about it. really appreciate all the work that everybody is doing to try and make this community event a success. And looking forward to being in London.

    Shimel: As am I. I will be at all three of these events as well and you hit it there, Sam. Both the workshop and DevSecOps, these are community events. London has a fantastic DevOps community. Looking for your support, and I think it’s gonna be a great week for DevOps. So with that being said I think we’re about out of time here. Helen – as always it’s a pleasure to hear your voice and have you on the show with us. Look forward to seeing you in person.

    Gary, always a pleasure, my friend. I’m sorry, Helen – I stepped on you there.

    Beal: I was just gonna say, thank you very much for having me on and really looking forward to seeing you guys as well.

    Shimel: Great. Gary – as always, a pleasure.

    Gruver: It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to speak with you, Alan, and look forward to helping out the DevOps community.

    Shimel: Very cool – and Sam, what can I say that hasn’t already been said?

    Fell: I don’t know. You could say “goodbye?”

    Shimel: Okay – in that case, goodbye. This is Alan Shimel. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat. See you all in London for DevOps week.

    — Alan Shimel

  • IT Revolution Announces Agenda For DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018

    Latest round of speakers added to the conference program include leaders from Adidas, IBM, Jaguar Land Rover, UBS, Microsoft and Capital One

    PORTLAND, Ore., May 2, 2018 — IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 conference agenda is now live (http://bit.ly/2HsSzA5). The DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 (DOES18) features technical, architectural and experience reports from leaders that have pioneered change through DevOps. The event takes place 25-26 June, 2018 at the Intercontinental London – The O2.

    Attendees are encouraged to register now, as the event has previously sold out. Register here: https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/register/

    “We are excited to feature world-class speakers who not only are driving change in their organizations, but are pioneering new practices to help their organizations win in the marketplace,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “For the first time, in addition to technology leaders, we’ll also be hearing experience reports from business leaders, product managers, project managers, and security managers, who will share how they benefit from, and are helping to, accelerate DevOps transformations.”

    The full program also highlights additional technology and business leaders who will be speaking, including:

    • Shaun Norris, Global Head, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Standard Chartered Bank
    • Markus Rautert, Vice President Platform Engineering & Architecture, Adidas
    • Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Azure Storage & Cloud Edge, Microsoft
    • Ann Marie Fred, Senior Software Engineering Manager, IBM
    • John Rzeszotarski, SVP, Director of Continuous Delivery and Feedback, KeyBank
    • Jelena Laketic, Head of SWAT, UBS
    • Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute
    • Daniele Romano, Global Product Owner Continuous Delivery, ING
    • Huub van der Wouden, Program Manager, Lean and Agile Software Development, Dutch Railways
    • Zane Lackey, Chief Security Officer, Signal Sciences
    • John Schmidt, Director of Product Management, Capital One
    • Fin Goulding, Co-author of FLOW, International CIO, Aviva
    • Fernando Cornago, Senior Director – Platform Engineering, Adidas
    • Oksana Nekrasova, DevOps Engineering Manager, Dell EMC
    • Anton Rymkus, Principal Software Engineer, DevOps Architect, Dell EMC
    • Rob England, Managing Director, Teal Unicorn
    • Dr. Cherry Vu, CEO, Teal Unicorn
    • Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering, Infotainment, Jaguar Land Rover
    • Steve Mayner, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant, Scaled Agile
    • Dr. Richard Cook, Physician, Educator, and Research Scientist, Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, Ohio State University
    • Daniel Franzen, Enterprise Architect, Swedish Migration Agency
    • Jonas Elmqvist, Software Development Unit Manager, Swedish Migration Agency

    Share This: #DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 organizers announce full agenda! http://bit.ly/2HsSzA5 @DOES_EUR #DOES18

    About the DevOps Enterprise Summit
    The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.

    Entering its third year in Europe and fifth year in the US, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.

    The event features experience report and subject matter expert talks from technology leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within an increasingly software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations.

    About IT Revolution

    IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of IT professionals.

    # # #

    Contact:

    Jeremy Douglas

    Catapult PR-IR

    303-581-7760, ext. 16

    jdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

     

  • The DevOps Cha-Cha from DOES San Francisco

    The DevOps Cha-Cha from DOES San Francisco

    DevOps Cha-ChaThe 4th annual DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) in San Francisco this week was, in my opinion, the best one yet. Lots to report about, but I wanted to call out a new trend I am seeing that I call the DevOps Cha-Cha. You remember the Cha-Cha: three steps forward, two steps back, cha-cha-cha. Actually besides being a great dance with the right beat, that same three-steps forward, two-steps back is about what you would expect from large enterprises that are undertaking profound digital transformations.

    I say that this is normal because, despite all the great firsthand accounts of DevOps transformations on display at DOES this week, there was a bit of a whispered undercurrent. More than several people I spoke to talked about the fact that “this DevOps thing isn’t that easy.” Others spoke about the large number of “failed DevOps transformations or implementations.” Obviously, as the editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, I might have a skewed view of this, but let me put in my 2 cents and then some on this subject.

    DevOps Transformations Are Not Easy

    First of all, no one ever said DevOps transformations would be easy. I’m not sure why anyone would even think that. Changing cultures can be gut-wrenching. Sometimes it means replacing people who just can’t wrap their heads around a new culture and way of doing things. Other times it means ripping up the way people and teams interact with job roles and positions. Change is never easy. Frankly, if it was easy, everyone would have done it already. That is just the cultural piece. Imagine coupling that with new tools, new processes and new ways of building, testing and deploying software. Again, I’m not sure why anyone would think such an undertaking would be easily accomplished.

    Is anything truly worthwhile ever that easy, though? The real question is, Is the pain and trouble worth it? If you were at DOES this year or have read other success stories around DevOps and digital transformation, I think you will find the answer is, “You bet it is.”

    If you go into a DevOps transformation thinking it is going to be easy, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Doing DevOps is not just a matter of being one of the cool kids on the block or trying something new for kicks. It means you are dedicated to seeing it through. It means you are going to think through, plan, learn and do what needs to be done.

    Failure Is Not An Option

    Also important to keep in mind—and this is really the meat of it—is that DevOps transformations shouldn’t and don’t proceed in a smooth linear manner. While at a macro level over a period of time you should be able to discern progress (depending on how you define progress), when you drill down you find fits and starts, steps forward followed by steps backward. There also will be steps sideways and sometimes no steps at all in any given moment. But like life itself, that is how DevOps transformations go.

    I was speaking with someone at DOES (I don’t remember this moment who), who told me every business plan they had ever seen had revenue growth like a hockey stick—just straight up on sharp angle. The same is true for the benefits realized in every DevOps transformation plan. If only DevOps and life worked that way. It is the rare bird that has shows a revenue line that is straight and angled that way.

    Real life is filled with starts and stops. You learn from your mistakes; you get it right the next time. Sometimes you need to take a step back to take more steps forward. DevOps is no different. It is not homogenized and doesn’t always (if at all) proceed smoothly. The real test is whether over a longer period of time you are achieving your goals (did you even define your goals or just thought DevOps would fix everything?). You can’t look at any given moment or event and say, “Our DevOps transformation was a failure.”

    Your DevOps transformation is only a failure if you end it before you get started, or before you can overcome the roadblocks in the way. At its heart DevOps means we keep improving. Think of those failures and feedback loops. You do your post mortem, you learn from your mistakes and you keep plowing ahead. It is only a failure if you let it be one by stopping.

    The DevOps Cha-Cha

    In my opinion, you look at your failures during your DevOps transformation and you make lemonade from those lemons. You learn from them and keep moving forward, one foot after another. Imagine a hot Latin beat in your head. Start moving, one, two, one-two-three, one, two, one-two-three, that’s it—now you’re doing the DevOps Cha-Cha. Keep the beat, keep dancing and keep doing DevOps.

    More DOES Coverage

    If you are interested in hearing what some of the speakers, attendees and sponsors of DOES 2017 in San Francisco have to say, be sure to visit our DevOpsTV YouTube channel, where we have a DOES San Fran 2017 playlist. There are about a dozen videos up there now, but will be adding to that every day as editing completes.

    Also, we have lots of coverage of past DevOps Enterprise Summits. Here is one for this year, but search devopsy.kinsta.cloud for lots more and DevOpsTV for videos of years past.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: Taking Care of Your People with Rob England, IT Skeptic, DOES Speaker

    DevOps Chat: Taking Care of Your People with Rob England, IT Skeptic, DOES Speaker

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with Rob England, the IT Skeptic. Rob joins us from New Zealand (you have to love the internet). Rob is going to speak at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit London, June 5-6, about the importance of taking care of your people in the DevOps transformation process. Rob is always an entertaining fellow and this chat is no different. If you are attending DOES London this year, you don’t want to miss his session!

    As usual, the streaming media of our conversation is immediately below and the transcript of our chat follows that:

    Transcript of the Chat

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. This is Alan Shimel from devopsy.kinsta.cloud here for another DevOps Chat. We’re lucky to be joined on this DevOps Chat by a friend of mine and a person who’s actually appeared before on our DevOps Chat, all the way from New Zealand: Rob England, the IT Skeptic. Rob, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Rob England: Hi, Alan, and, hi, everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here.

    Shimel: So, you know, Rob, actually, I didn’t ask, but are you back home in New Zealand right now?

    England: I am, so I’m about to have my breakfast. [Laughs]

    Shimel: Okay.

    England: Tomorrow. Your tomorrow. So –

    Shimel: Yep, it’s my tomorrow. You’re already living my tomorrow—that’s interesting. So, Rob, of course, I think you’re well known within the DevOps community and the IT community at large, but, for anyone who’s listening may not be familiar, why don’t you give us a quick little background?

    England: Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I come from a service management background, so I have a bit of a presence internationally with a small blog that got a service management following, so that’s how I sort of became internationally networked. And, originally, I was a bit of a skeptic of the whole DevOps thing, but I was gradually turned, by Gene Kim and by John Willis and by Jez Humble and others, into a bit of an enthusiast, and now my whole life is DevOps, really. I consult here in Wellington, New Zealand to the DevOps community and I’m working with a couple of the largest government departments here in New Zealand now, helping them on their DevOps journey.

    Shimel: That’s just great. And, Rob, you’re traveling from New Zealand to London, June 5th and 6th, for this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit, DOES London. It’s at the –

    England: I am.

    Shimel: – QEII Conference Center. And you’ll be speaking there as well.

    England: I am. Oh, I’m really, really pleased and honored to be selected to speak; I think that’s fantastic.

    Shimel: I think it is too. So, Rob, we’re lucky enough to interview a few other speakers from DOES—not only from London but in past DOES events in San Francisco, but can you give our audience a little bit of a flavor for what it’s like or what’s the process like or what motivates one to go speak at a DOES event?

    England: [Chuckles] Oh, in this case, what motivated me was Gene Kim, so I was talking to him about some of the people stuff that I’m quite passionate about, and he said, “Hey, you should write that up and submit it,” so I did. And, from there, it was pretty straightforward—I put all the details in and had my proposal accepted—so that’s very exciting. As I say, I’m very passionate about the people side of things and the cultural change, and the focus for this presentation is around taking care of our people through that transformation.

    Shimel: Excellent. And so, Rob, when you mention people like that, I’m reminded or brought back to a—I think it was Adrian Cockcroft’s presentation in San Francisco this past—don’t remember if it was October or November, but you may remember. And Adrian’s presentation was very much that,“Hey, people are your most valuable asset and you gotta treat them right. And, when you think about the money you spend on tools and all of these other things, it pales in comparison to the importance of spending money on people.”

    England: Yeah. Absolutely. In the past, even before my DevOps life, I used to write about how, if you look at any project, when we’ve had projects, and how the money was allocated within that project, if it wasn’t sort of one-third people, one-third process, one-third tools, then you had a very strong indicator it wasn’t gonna be a successful project.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm. Repeat that again, though, ’cause you know how you New Zealanders are – you talk so fast. [Chuckles] That it was one-third, one-third, one-third?

    England: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one-third people, one-third practices, one-third tools. If it’s not something like that, it’s very typical to see project proposals that are going to spend 50 percent of their money on installing the tools and 50 percent of their money on redesigning their processes—oh, and, by the way, there’s a day’s training. You know, and it’s like, well, there’s nothing else recognizably about workshopping with people or collaborating with people or, you know, coaching people or all the other people aspects. It’s very common to see projects that are not planning to spend any money on all that, and I think that’s a –

    Shimel: I agree.

    England: – a formula for failure, right?

    Shimel: Yeah, no, it is. I mean, we tend to take the people part of it for granted, and, just as you said, you don’t spend the money on it, will spend a ton of money on tools and infrastructure. Right?

    England: And I have to say, I think that’s one of the two primary reasons why service management initiatives were so often unsuccessful, was that, I thought, didn’t coach us enough to focus on the culture and the transformation, and we spent too much time on process, so DevOps—for me, the power of DevOps or a big part of its power is it’s focused on people and culture.

    Shimel: I have to agree with you. I have to—you know, Rob, I’m reminded of, back in my security days, the co-founder of StillSecure, I went to visit a rather large bank out in New York, and it was about vulnerability management. And we were talking about the vulnerability management program they had in place and I mentioned to ’em that the way they were doing things, it was forcing his security team not only just to scan at night, which is, you know, normal, but to actually only do remediations on weekends.

    England: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: And I said, “You know, that means that your security team is working every weekend, in addition to working during the week, ’cause you don’t have enough people to stagger that.” And he said, “I don’t care. I pay them by the week; I don’t pay them by the hour. I don’t care if they work seven days a week.” And that –

    England: There’s a good boss, eh?

    Shimel: Yeah, no, that’s someone you’d wanna work for, right? But this, unfortunately—you know, we talk about culture and the whole “Kumbaya” thing that many people kinda try to say with DevOps, but it’s real. You gotta treat your people as your greatest asset, and that was Adrian’s message, right, at DOES San Francisco. They’re not –

    England: That’s powerful.

    Shimel: Yeah. And they—if you treat ’em like crap, crap is what you’re gonna get, I’m afraid.

    England: Absolutely. And my particular focus for this presentation is about the effect of the transition on people in your organization and, in particular, there’s this “Get on the bus” thing, but we don’t wanna actually throw people under the bus, so it’s giving people the opportunity and the time to grow and to make the transition. There’s very often a “revolution, not evolution” thinking in management’s mind: “Are we just going to change everything?” And, again, we’re very neglectful of the fact—the old bell curve—we’re very neglectful of the fact that just because a few people are coming along doesn’t mean we—we still have to allocate more time for the great masses to get their head around this thing and absorb some of these really quite challenging and radical concepts that underpin Agile and DevOps—it does people’s heads in, as we say down here.

    Shimel: Yeah. So, Rob, let’s talk about that a little bit, if we can. You know, you’ve now consulted, as you said, with a bunch of government departments and companies, both in New Zealand and in other parts of the world. What, from a people point of view, what is the hardest things that these guys or these people have to kinda wrap their heads around to make it successful?

    England: Oh, I’m sure the biggest challenge is getting—well, actually, one of the biggest challenges is getting away from that silo-ed thinking, and so the other power of DevOps, along with its focus on people, is its focus on systems and systems theory and systems thinking. And so I think that they struggle to get out of their silo and start thinking holistically and seeing the whole flow of value and understanding their role in that. That is a big challenge to just about everybody.

    Shimel: Agreed.

    England: Then there’s also—yeah. And then there’s also peculiar challenges to each organization as well, right? So I’m thinking of one where a particularly psychopathic CIO had moved on, and it was trying to teach people that, “It’s okay now. You can come out from under your rocks, you know? It’s gone.” So that’s –

    Shimel: “Out from under your rocks.”

    England: Yeah. That’s a—they all sort of crawled away into shelter, you know? And so that’s the peculiar problem in one situation. So there’s—you know, every place has its own challenges, but a universal one is that siloed thinking and another universal one is just the letting go of the—do you remember the Bastard Operator from Hell, BOFH, or –

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    England: – or Dilbert‘s Wally? You know, these characters that—it’s considered funny in IT that people have dysfunctional behaviors and are misanthropic, and part of the DevOps message is just we don’t tolerate that anymore. That negativity is not allowed—we just don’t tolerate it—and getting rid of some of that old cynical bitter and twisted IT thinking is also a common challenge.

    Shimel: I agree. I agree. And you know what? I think part of it is not only the negativity from whether it be a supervisor or peer; I think the other biggest thing that I personally see and when I talk to organizations around DevOps and stuff, and not just dev and ops—when I talk with QA and security and management and so forth—is the finger-pointing, is the—it’s almost like American politics, I’m sorry to say, in that “Yeah, I know this is screwed up, but blame the other guy,” or “If you think this is screwed up, you should see how screwed up the other guy is.”

    England: Absolutely.

    Shimel: You know? “And it’s not my fault; I inherited a mess,” and all of this kind of thing where one of the refreshing things about DevOps is it started with the blameless postmortem, but it’s more than just a blameless postmortem—it’s about “Stop pointing the finger and let’s work on solving this together, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, it’s this mate’s fault and it’s his problem.’”

    England: “I’ve got your back.”

    Shimel: Yep. I mean, and that –

    England: I’ve got your back, buddy.”

    Shimel: You know, and that may sound hokey and “Kumbaya-ry” and  all that, but, really, I think that’s when you start building a team.

    England: There’s a really good cartoon, that might be a Paul Wilkinson one, where the ops guys are at one end of the boat, looking down at the dev guys at the other end of the boat, trying to deal with a fountain of water and saying, “Not my problem, not my end of the boat.”

    Shimel: Right. Uh-huh. Exactly. And we’re all on the same boat, though. So –

    England: Yeah. Yeah.

    Shimel: So this is a real thing. Rob, other than DOES, have you been talking about this kind of subject at other events and so forth?

    England: Oh, for sure. So, actually, it’s been an interest of mine since before I was consulting. I used to work in—for my sins, for a vendor, and I used to do work on professional development there and trying not to let the technical people fall under the bus and trying to get them to skill up to be consultants, rather than just product jockeys. So I’ve worked and talked in this field for a long time, just as a personal passion. I hate to see good people lost, you know, just because their organization failed to make sure they were coming along and to take care of them.

    Shimel: Sure. Sure.

    England: So that’s a long-term passion, but this particular topic now I’m hatching especially for DOES, to put together a presentation specifically about the DevOps implications of—it’s called “Surviving DevOps,” so making sure everybody’s—it’s not just that you individually survive, but that “no person left behind,” you know, as well.

    Shimel: I agree with you. So, Rob, geez, I’ve met you—wasn’t this year’s San Francisco DOES; it was last year’s. So it wasn’t 2016; it was 2015 DOES San Francisco. And we’ve, of course, seen each other several times since, but –

    England: And, you know, I’m one of the few people in the world who’s been to every single DOES in both the U.S. and the UK.

    Shimel: So I think I’m one of them too, actually, but –

    England: Yep, you would be.

    Shimel: Yeah, which is interesting, when you think about it that way. But let’s—I mean, many in our audience may not have been lucky enough to even get to one, let alone five or six of these things. Can you give our audience a flavor of why? Why do you keep coming back? Why did you feel compelled to wanna speak at this one? What makes this a great event in your mind?

    England: Well, I think it’s the fount of knowledge for DevOps, especially DevOps enterprise, so my interest is DevOps for hoses, not DevOps for unicorns. And, very much, the focus of the enterprise conference is around DevOps in the real world, DevOps in the enterprise world, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is that Gene does a fantastic job of focusing and coaching presenters to make sure that their presentations are really short and pithy and full of value, and they also make sure that the presenters are practitioners, so there’s not a lot of talking heads, except for some really high-value experts like John Willis and Jez Humble and Adrian Cockcroft, the people who are up there purely because of their intellectual strengths. But most of the speakers are there because they’re reporting back from the coalface about their own experiences and learnings, and so that, to me, is gold.

    Shimel: Yes. Any—well, I guess that kinda says it all, Rob. If anyone had any doubts about whether they’d wanna go to this or not, that clears that up. Rob, anything else happening exciting around DevOps you think people should be on the lookout for?

    England: Oh, well, I’m not sure about _____ – the value for me is that I live on the last rock on the planet, so I actually get quite a different lens on DevOps than perhaps those, like yourself, immersed in the big economies and big societies, and, certainly, it’s going gangbusters here. There’s a huge wave of interest in the mainstream—in government, in the airline, the banks—and I’m gathering that that’s not necessarily the case everywhere in the world, so, you know, I think that –

    Shimel: No, I think it is. I really think it is.

    England: Yeah. Yeah. But they’re not just dabbling anymore, right? They’re actually transforming; they’re restructuring the way they go. And, to me, that’s the excitement of the moment, is that this thing is mainstream. You know, it’s bridged the chasm. Remember the Star Wars book about crossing the chasm? You know, the –

    Shimel: Yeah. Sure do.

    England: – DevOps has gone from the early adopters to mainstream now. It’s definitely –

    Shimel: Oh, it’s certainly mainstream, but I –

    England: – the majority.

    Shimel: So I think it’s in the early majority, though, not the later majority.

    England: That’s true. That’s true. It’s still not everyone; it’s still not—but, yeah, but it’s certainly jumped—it’s certainly bridged the chasm and it’s on its way up that curve.

    Shimel: Oh, no doubt about that. No doubt about it and, hey, we live it every day here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, as we continue to kind of chronicle all this. Anyway, Rob, we’re about out of time. I wanna thank you for joining us all the way from New Zealand. Look forward to seeing you in London and your presentation and thanks for doing everything you do, Rob. I mean, you know, you’re a healthy IT skeptic. In IT, skepticism is healthy, right?

    England: It sure is and I love doing it. Thanks, Alan. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend.

    Shimel: All right, Rob. You be well. We’ll see you in just a couple—well, it’s about two months now, probably.

    England: See you there.

    Shimel: All right. Rob England, IT Skeptic, speaker at DOES London on June 5th and 6th at QE Conference Center. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat. We’ll see you soon on the next DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Docker On Windows, One Engineering System, Microsoft Uses DevOps To Reinvent Itself

    Docker On Windows, One Engineering System, Microsoft Uses DevOps To Reinvent Itself

    While at DOES San Francisco 2016 last week I had a chance to sit down with two presenters who work at Microsoft. One is someone I have interviewed before at both DOES and here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Sam Guckenheimer, Product Owner of Microsoft Visual Studio Cloud Services. Joining Sam and I is Ed Blankenship, Product Manager at Microsoft for Visual Studio Team Services. We had a wide ranging discussion on Microsoft’s own DevOps journey including the move to one engineering system, to SaaS based systems, security and finally Docker on Windows.

    Ed and Sam presented at DOES on Microsoft’s move to a single engineering system that now serves over 62,000 users within Microsoft alone! Sam also did a Lean Coffee session on security and compliance. All in all it was a great discussion with Sam and Ed. I know it is a bit long at 17+ minutes, but have a listen and enjoy.

    Also if you are interested in Docker on Windows, please check out this free and easy hands on lab Microsoft has made available to our readers here. The lab allows you to install Docker on Windows 10 and more. You don’t need anything on your end it is all self-contained in a web browser.

    You can see some of the other 50 videos we recorded from this years DOES San Francisco event on our YouTube channel, DevOpsTV.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016: The DevOps Transformation Continues

    DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016: The DevOps Transformation Continues

    I had a great few days out in San Francisco at the 3rd annual DevOps Enterprise Summit produced by IT Revolution and Gene Kim. Once again Electric Cloud was back as the founding sponsor. Beyond that there were a host of other sponsors. But the real stars of the show are the many speakers from organizations the world over who relay their own DevOps Transformation stories.

    I had a chance to sit down the Gene Kim and Derek Langone, CEO of Xebia Labs to talk a little bit about what makes DOES so special:

    Another great thing about DOES is that at this point many of the speakers have been coming back year after year. So while we hear about new companies on their DevOps transformation, we also check in and see where others have progressed since last year. I told someone it is like a new season on a Netflix series and after waiting a year, we can binge and catch up on what we missed.

    Another thing I spoke to Derek and Gene about is that not all DevOps transformations are successful. In fact some fail. From a learning perspective we can learn more from the failures than we do from the successes. You can hear what Gene and Derek have to say on this as well.

    devopstvsquareThis video is one of the 25 that are up on our YouTube channel, DevOpsTV from DOES San Francisco 2016. There are another 25 or so videos that will be posted in the next few days as well. This should give you a good idea of what happened at DOES this year.

    Also while on DevOpsTV, you should check out DOES videos from San Francisco 2015, London 2016 and almost 300 videos on DevOps in total!

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: InterConnect 2017 w/ Randy Newell, IBM DevOps

    DevOps Chat: InterConnect 2017 w/ Randy Newell, IBM DevOps

    In this episode of DevOps Chats we are again joined by Randy Newell, Director World Wide Marketing for DevOps. Randy had a bunch of news he wanted to share with us including the call for speakers for IBM’s InterConnect 2017 which is open until November 11th. Randy also gave us a preview of the IBM sessions at the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit.

    Randy always has some good news and point of views to share. This interview is no different. Enjoy!

    As usual the streaming file is below with a printed transcript below:

    Alan Shimel:                Hey, everyone. Alan Shimel for another DevOps Chat. Happy to be joined on this episode by Randy Newell, Director Worldwide DevOps Marketing for IBM and a friend of mine. Randy, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Randy Newell:             Thanks, Alan. Good to be here.

    Alan Shimel:                Absolutely. Randy, I invited you on because it’s getting near that time of year again where we’re ramping up for IBM Interconnect and I know you and your team have spent – have already invested weeks if not months of man hours and blood, sweat and tears in getting Interconnect ready to rock for this year. Why don’t you give our audience some highlights?

    Randy Newell:             Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean this is absolutely the most exciting time of the year for a number of reasons. I mean we’re getting ready for Interconnect, which we’ll talk about. We’ve got really key events in the DevOps space like the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Gartner puts on a big applications strategies event in December and so forth, so this is absolutely, you know, my favorite time of the year.

    I think the – kind of the cool thing that’s hot right now is we have just gone live with the call for speakers for IBM Interconnect 2017. That event is March 19th to the 23rd in Las Vegas. Last year we had, you know, over 20,000 attendees. Next year, this coming year, we’ll be even bigger. So it’ll be over 24,000 attendees.

    Alan Shimel:                Wow.

    Randy Newell:             Yeah. Where we ended up last year – and you were there, Alan. I mean the – it’s exciting, it’s a big conference. DevOps is a major piece of what happens at this bigger conference that has, you know, cloud and cognitive and mobile going on as well, but the DevOps piece itself I think was almost 250 sessions last year, labs, workshops, sessions, and I think one of the big things that we’re doing this year is actually bolstering the ops side of this thing. So we’ll have over 300 sessions and labs and workshops this year with a really good balance across the DevOps lifecycle, if you will, and we’re pretty excited about it.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. Sounds great, Randy. Randy, I – you know, you mentioned the call for speakers. If I’m – I happened to take a look. I believe the call for speakers is open through November 11th, correct?

    Randy Newell:             Yep. We’ve just opened it up in the last week so now through November 11th, you know, we’d encourage everybody to get their proposals in. I mean if it’s not something that you want to speak at we would obviously encourage you to attend the event anyway but would encourage, you know, a lot of the subject matter experts and thought leaders that pay attention to devopsy.kinsta.cloud to submit papers to this. It is – you know, if people have not attended before or watched online, you know, just thinking about some of the highlights from last year, and you interviewed [laughs] so many of these people –

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah.

    Randy Newell:             – you know, Lloyds with Mark Howell and John LaFreniere at Hertz, Topo Pal who is a Cap One fellow from Capital One, Nationwide with Carmen DeArdo and just some really super innovative smaller companies like Security First Insurance, Ben Bomhoff, who I know you interviewed

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah.

    Randy Newell:             – and, you know, it just keeps going. Presentations from a lot of our cool business partners like Datical and Blue Agility and PointSource, so it’s really high quality presentation content from organizations big and small who have figured out DevOps and are scaling it and getting, you know, real success out of it, and then I think we’re also drilling down from an IBM perspective to provide labs and workshops and so forth to really get deep into some of the sever system tools that we’re providing.

    Alan Shimel:                You got some good hands-on stuff. Randy, for those who might be listening and saying, “Geez, I’d – you know, I’d like to throw my hat in, I’d like to speak,” what are you looking for in not only speakers, obviously, but in subject matter?

    Randy Newell:             Well, I think it’s actually an interesting topic for this year because I think we’re really expanding what we want to see. I think kind of standard fare, but we want to continue to push on these areas because we’re pushing the envelope on what we’re seeing clients able to achieve, you know, areas of continuous delivery, application release automation, software test automation including things like API testing and virtualization, but I would underscore and expand some of the areas on the ops side, especially where we’re looking for application performance management, IT ops management, IT ops analytics, and then I think especially kind of where we’re come over the last year with the introduction of the garage method as well as what we’ll be doing between now and Interconnect around tool chains. I think those are areas that are particularly exciting for us to see new presentation proposals on, so we’d really encourage some of those topics.

    Alan Shimel:             Yep. And I’ll just mention – ’cause, Randy, as I mentioned to you offline, I myself am submitting a speaking proposal. What’s nice is you can submit basically a one-man speaking proposal, you could submit a panel or anything in between there, so there’s lots of options and also if you go and register or to submit you will see – I think you guys did a great job of kind of guiding people what area you’re proposed session deals with so that it can be categorized and put in there and, you know, kind of so you could pick the best of the best, right, within an existing –

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah, there’s a –

    Randy Newell:             – subject matter.

    Randy Newell:                – lot of prompting, you’ve got a lot of prompting. So if people are going about doing this go to – you know, I mean the easiest way is just to search on IBM Interconnect 2017 call for speakers, and when you get into the tool just take a look. There’s two main topic areas where we’ll find the DevOps stuff. It’s listed directly under hybrid and DevOps and then also under Bluemix and Softlayer there’s DevOps as well. There’s an awful lot of prompts under the hybrid category for some of the topics that I just reeled off in addition to a whole bunch of others and don’t stop there. I mean people should have some fun with this; what they’re challenged with, where they’re seeing successes. I mean we want to push the envelope a bit on the type of topics that we’re seeing.

    Alan Shimel:                Sure. And Randy, just as an aside, it’s not all DevOps all the time – well, actually it is all DevOps all the time for me anyway, but IBM Interconnect also – like last year, for instance – cognitive and Watson and some of the really good kind of gee whiz kind of stuff that IBM’s working on is also on full display at Interconnect.

    Randy Newell:             Absolutely. Yeah, there’s a whole – as you’re aware, we did the whole _____ arena which is a lot of hands-on to be able to play with brand new capabilities, Watson APIs, [laughs] a foosball table that’s hooked up live to a Bluemix application. I mean there’s just – there’s so much kind of exciting stuff to do and it is – you know, while I think we lead with Interconnect as our key presentation of our cloud capabilities, we’re so integrated, you know, within IBM that you will see how that plays out in collaboration with Watson capabilities. We’ll see representation of our systems group and, you know, representation of Z mainframe technology. We’ll see mobile capabilities.

    It really is a great display. And I think it’s actually – in the industry, it’s probably pretty unique in the fact that – I mean historically Interconnect represents many different conferences coming together that IBM offered, and so you have a slice of the IT organization and now kind of increasingly bringing in line of business representatives and so forth so you’ve got – for me anyway, looking at it from a DevOps perspective, you’ve got dev, you’ve got ops, you’ve got your business owners, you’ve got everyone attending, you’ve got practitioners that are attending, you’ve got architects. It’s really a neat opportunity and I think when organizations are evaluating their attendance at Interconnect, you know, it’s really – the interesting part of it is we can bring a large organization and there is deep content for all parts as you drill down and get technical and there are also very interesting subjects for the organization as a whole, so it’s a very broad and deep context from an IT perspective.

    Alan Shimel:                Excellent. And Randy, for those who maybe don’t want to – you know, are not planning on speaking or presenting but would like to still attend, of course it’s open to anyone, right?

    Randy Newell:             Absolutely.

    Alan Shimel:                You can buy tickets. I mean, again, I would just probably Google search IBM Interconnect 2017. And Randy, the dates – I know you moved it later in March this year. Just again for our audience.

    Randy Newell:             Yep. It’s March 19th to the 23rd in Las Vegas –

    Alan Shimel:                Perfect.

    Randy Newell:             – at the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay.

    Alan Shimel:                And Mandalay Bay, yep. That’s a big show. But Randy, that’s not the only conference IBM DevOps is kind of really exerting a strong presence. We have the Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit coming up around Election Day, November – I think it’s 5th, 6th, 7th, perhaps in San Francisco.

    Randy Newell:             We will be out there on Election Day, yes. So all attendees make sure you do your absentee vote before you go unless you’re in the Bay Area. [Laughs] 

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. Exactly. But you guys have kind of an all-star lineup and a bunch of different activities lined up for that week. Why don’t you just give us a quick preview, if you don’t mind.

    Randy Newell:             Sure. So DevOps Enterprise Summit, you know, this is Gene Kim’s lead event and it’s November 7th to 9th in San Francisco. IBM’s a platinum sponsor, there’s a lot of great sponsors. It’s an exciting event and so we’re really looking forward to it. I think it’s – you know, the content especially is very well curated and I think a lot of the success stories that are brought forward are really in tune with kind of the frontend of what’s happening with DevOps where organizations are achieving scale and real results, so I think in that case it’s particularly exciting among the many DevOps events that are out there. We’ve put together I think a really interesting set of presentations, and I’ll click through them real quickly here. I think one that’s particularly exciting is we call it adopting DevOps at scale, lessons learned at NBCUniversal, Kaiser and GitHub and IBM. So Sanjeev Sharma, who you’ve interviewed a number of times –

    Alan Shimel:                Sure.

    Randy Newell:             – he’s an IBM distinguished engineer and the author of DevOps for Dummies is going to kind of host that panel, and on that panel we’ve got John Comas from NBCUniversal, Raghu Raman from Kaiser,  and we’ll also represent some of what we’ve been doing inside at IBM where we’re about – you know, we’re kind of well into our DevOps transformation. We’ve got about 40,000 developers that are in the process of transforming to a DevOps approach and we’re through about 10,000 of those and a lot of that learning we’ll be bringing forward as part of this presentation. So the idea is, you know, how do we use that time that we’ve got in that particular session to really show off three or four very significant organizations that have been able to achieve some scale? And I think what Gene has represented as kind of the horses, but you know, the more typical, big, complex enterprise organization and how they can succeed at both, you know, the two-pizza team and scale it all the way up to, you know, kind of enterprise adoption.

    Alan Shimel:                Sure. You know what, Randy, I wanted to just mention – you mentioned Raghunath Raman from Kaiser Permanente and actually he and another fellow who I interviewed at Interconnect last year, John LaFreniere – I probably butchered John’s name, I apologize, I’m better with Indian names than French names but… [Laughs]

    Randy Newell:             Well, just say John’s name with a French accent and you’ll get by.

    Alan Shimel:                John from Hertz, doing an amazing transformation there. I have both Raghunath and John on a webinar. I think it’s on November 29th, so this’ll be after DevOps Enterprise Summit, but we’re gonna talk about, you know, transformations and checking in – both of these gentlemen, Raghunath and John have really done some pretty cool stuff with, as you say – you know, or as Gene says horses, right? Not unicorns but large organizations and especially the Hertz one, Randy.

    It’s kind of just an out with the old and in with the new kind of transformation and a little unusual where Raghunath I think has gone more of a traditional transformation, but he’s also pushed the needle a heck of a lot there. So for those – the audience out there, November 29th is that webinar on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You can register online. Highly, highly recommend that one. Randy, I think there’s some news around Bluemix garage method around for Gene’s event as well or no?

    Randy Newell:             Yeah, definitely. And so let me – and let me tell you that there’s a couple of sessions, additional sessions at DevOps Enterprise Summit where we’ll be showing some of that off. So one is adapting the squad model with Ann Marie Fred, at – and she’s an IBMer – and she’ll talk about some of the transformation that we’ve done internally at IBM. So that’s an exciting one. And then, of course, you know Rosalind Radcliffe.

    She’s co presenting with Rich Jackson from Walmart and that is a mainframe DevOps team savings of the day at Walmart. So there’s a number of really interesting presentations. We’re also running a series of lightening talks, demos, in our booth area and we’ll publish a schedule. So for people who are attending that particular conference, you know, look for a theater presentation for what we’ll be doing in the booth, we’ll be driving down into some key offerings like method and tool chain into urban code into test automation, Bluemix, et cetera. So that can be a lot of fun, and then of course, encourage people to attend the overall conference and we’ll be highlighting these other presentations that we just talked about.

    But you asked about, you know, kind of methods and tool chains and I – you know, for those of your listeners and readers who may have missed it, last year at Gene’s conference we introduced the Bluemix garage method – we refer to it just generally as a method – and as I indicated earlier, we’re kind of, you know, a CIO-level endorsed movement, transformation to DevOps inside of IBM. We’ve got, you know, over 40,000 developers. We’re about 10,000 developers into this material transformation which impacts process and tooling and underlying infrastructure technology and methods that we’re using, and we’ve harvested a lot of the learnings from this significant transformation as well as what we do through global services, client interactions and codified that into a methodology, and so, you know, people can go to http://www.ibm.com/devops/method or just Google Bluemix garage method. And what you’ll find is we’ve populated this with elements of the methodology.

    What’s evolved since we announced this thing is we’re now rolling in reference architectures, a concept of tracks, you know, syncing with online courseware, the idea being, you know, as we’ve dealt with both transforming ourselves and as we see our clients adopting DevOps some of the challenges are how do we take the success of that two-pizza team where you have focused on business outcomes and technical outcomes and then scale that. And some of the challenges are cultural, some of them are process-related, some of them are tools-related, and so that’s a lot of what’s gone into the methodology, and so these tracks are somewhat – are basically use case-oriented. I am building, you know, some bimodal or multispeed application, I’m building a cloud native application, I’m building a mobile app, those sorts of things, and it surrounds you with elements of the methodology, of reference architectures, and now we’re moving towards this introduction of tool chain.

    And the tool chain concept is really cool and people will find it especially cool coming from IBM, is because based on that use case that you select, the specific tool chain, you will be prompted with a set of services that sit on Bluemix, which is our cloud platform, and it’s a mix of both IBM services as well as third party services that represent the key elements and key services that you need in your tool chain for the particular use case. So if you’re, you know, selecting a – you know, let’s say a simple cloud native application it would prompt you on, you know, GitHub and a WebIDE and our delivery pipeline service from IBM and you literally click a button that says, you know, build this tool chain for me and it instantiates that, provisions it and integrates those tools and presents it to you as your dashboard on Bluemix and all of that takes, you know, a couple of minutes. So the idea is that through method reference architecture tool chain you have the ability to spin it very rapidly and then some guidance and architectures for actually how to move forward and how to scale, and so that’s kind of it. And I know you’ve spent some time with Rachel and so forth who’s, you know, directly involved with the garage method and kind of expanding this thing in conjunction with how we’re using it in the Bluemix garages and really seeing some pretty exciting response to it.

    I think some of the customer’s names that we’ve mentioned earlier as well as others, you know, have seen some of this stuff firsthand and benefited from it, so we’re looking forward to gaining some commentary on that. It’s part of the reason that we’ve brought the GitHub team into the presentation that we’re doing at DevOps Enterprise Summit, because I think they’ve seen firsthand how the IBM transformation has actually utilized GitHub Enterprise, which is taking all the benefit of GitHub and using that within the Enterprise firewall through GitHub Enterprise and we have that instantiated as a, you know, full Bluemix service. So it’s pretty exciting execution.

    Alan Shimel:                Cool. Randy, we have gone significantly over our allotted time here. I apologize. I didn’t want to interrupt you and I think our audience finds it – will find it useful and informative, but I – for those of you who are still listening at the end of our interview, I thank you very much for staying with us and I think it was worth your time and I certainly hope so. Well, Randy, we’re gonna have to call it a wrap on this version of DevOps Chats. Perhaps we’ll have you back on if we have time before Enterprise –DevOps Enterprise Summit, but if not I’m sure we’ll have you back on before IBM Interconnect in March, maybe once we have some more information on speaker selected and stuff we can review some highlights.

    Randy Newell:             Yep. Fantastic. Appreciate the time, Alan. This was great.

    Alan Shimel:                Not a problem. Randy Newell, Worldwide Marketing – Director Worldwide Marketing for DevOps IBM. Thanks for being this segment’s guest on DevOps Chat and continued success and good luck. We’ll see you San Francisco I guess next for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. Until then, this is Alan Shimel of devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on another DevOps chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Transformations Everywhere; Join Us To Watch, Hear & Learn

    DevOps Transformations Everywhere; Join Us To Watch, Hear & Learn

    For me and many others the best way we learn about DevOps is to hear others who have set about on this journey. For three years Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit has been powered by hearing one DevOps Transformation experience after the next. The new DevOps Handbook has over 40 case studies of DevOps transformations. We here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be offering some great DevOps transformation stories this month that I wanted to share with you.

    First of all Monday afternoon (2pm eastern time) we will be having a webinar, “Leading Change at DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco“.  You can register by clicking the title or clicking here. The webinar will discuss leading DevOps transformation and features a pretty impressive cast:

    nicole-f-headshot

    Dr. Nicole Forsgren

    CEO and Chief Scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC

    Dr. Nicole Forsgren is an IT impacts expert who shows leaders and tech professionals how to unlock the potential of technology change in their organizations.

    sam-g-headshot

    Sam Guckenheimer

    Product Planner, Microsoft

    Sam Guckenheimer is the Product Owner for the Microsoft Visual Studio Cloud Services, including VS Team Services and Team Foundation Server.

    scott-p-headshot

    Scott Prugh

    Chief Architect & VP Software Development, CSG International

    Scott Prugh is chief architect and vice president of software at CSG International and has been with the company for 10 years.

    j-paul-reed-headshot

    J. Paul Reed

    Managing Partner, Release Engineering Approaches

    J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years’ experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such storied companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce.

    screen-shot-2016-10-29-at-6-30-30-pmNext week devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be out at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, where we will once again have a video booth and will be interviewing most of the speakers at DOES, as well as many guests and friends from the DevOps scene. If you are attending and would like to sit for a video interview stop by during Monday or Wednesday of the show.

    Our videos should be up in a few days afterwards, so if you can’t make it to San Francisco be sure to catch our interviews of the speakers and others.

    Later this month we have another webinar that I am really excited about. It is again about DevOps transformation experiences. It features:

    johnhertzJohn LaFreniere is the Vice President of Global IT Architecture for the Hertz Corporation.

    ramanRaghunath Raman, Director, Digital Shared Services, API Delivery & Integrations, Corporate Services & Digital Technologies (CSDT), Kaiser Permanente

    sanjeevSanjeev Sharma, is an internationally known DevOps, and Cloud Transformation thought leader, technology executive, and published author. Sanjeev’s industry experience includes tenures as CTO and Worldwide Technical Sales Leader, Acquisition Integration Technical Leader, and IT Architect. As an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Sanjeev is recognized at the highest levels of IBM’s exclusive core of technical leaders.

    You can register for this webinar here.

    Beyond these there is IBM InterConnect on the horizon, CA World, where I will be speaking as well, also in November and our own DevOps Connect: CD Summits this month and next in Austin, LA and Seattle.

    So yes indeed DevOps Transformations are everywhere. There is much to be learned from hearing these stories. Sometimes more from the mistakes they made then from the success. Check these out if like me you are interested in these tales from the front lines.

    — Alan Shimel